Sally Rooney books may be withdrawn from sale in UK bookshops

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Sally Rooney books may be withdrawn from sale in UK bookshops

2 December 2025

The Irish author, whose titles include Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends, wants United Kingdom royalties from her novels, and any screen adaptations made there, to go to Palestine Action, a British pro-Palestinian organisation.

The British government however considers Palestine Action to be a terrorist group, and banned them earlier this year.

In sending Rooney royalty payments, her UK publishers, and the BBC, who co-produced the 2020 TV adaptation of Normal People, Rooney’s second novel, would be breaking terrorism laws. The author says this could result in her novels being withdrawn from sale in the UK.

Read a chapter of a book daily in your RSS reader

17 November 2025

Made by Las Vegas based software developer Pablo Enoc, who’s also behind indie RSS aggregator powRSS, lettrss will send a chapter of the book you’re reading to your RSS reader each day.

Here’s an idea with merit.

Reading novels is just about the last thing I get to each evening, and I don’t usually cover much ground before falling asleep. If a chapter of whatever I was reading appeared in my RSS feed though, I might make more progress since I read a lot of what takes my interest there. This idea might get a few more of us reading more regularly, since a chapter at a time usually isn’t too onerous.

At the moment only books in the public domain (or those out of copyright) can be read with lettrss. But this idea has possibilities. Imagine if book publishers were to make recent titles available this way, through possibly a subscription model of some sort.

Children’s Booker Prize hopes to encourage younger people to read more books

17 November 2025

The Booker Prize, which recognises English language novels published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has unveiled a new award: the Children’s Booker Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2027.

The Children’s Booker Prize, which will launch in 2026 and be awarded annually from 2027, will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The aim of the prize is to engage and grow a new generation of readers by recognising and championing the best children’s fiction from writers around the world.

This is good news all around. Not only will the Children’s Booker encourage more younger people to read, it will also support authors with an enticement to write more stories for children. The more literary awards there are, the better it is for literature, writing, and reading, as a whole.

Average at Best, a memoir by Astrid Jorgensen, Pub Choir founder

29 October 2025

Brisbane based Australian musician and singer, and founder of Pub Choir, Astrid Jorgensen (Instagram page), recently published her memoir, Average at Best.

Average, says Jorgensen, is underrated, given how difficult it is to be the best:

By its very nature, ‘best’ is rare and elusive: you’re not going to get much of it in life. And I sure don’t want to miss out on deeply experiencing the fullness of my one precious existence, searching for the sliver of ‘best’.

One of Pub Choirs’ feats was, in August 2023, to assemble nineteen-thousand people across Australia to sing the ever popular Africa, a song recorded by American band Toto in 1982.

Authors claim Salesforce used their novels to train AI agents

21 October 2025

American novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore have launched legal action against Salesforce, accusing the San Francisco based software company of copyright infringement.

Tanzer and Gilmore allege Salesforce used thousands of novels, not just their work, without permission, to train AI agents.

Salesforce want to have their cake and eat it as well. After replacing several thousand workers with AI technologies, presumably saving the company large sums of money, Salesforce want to pay as little as possible to develop the AI agents that displaced the workers in the first place.

What part of any of this is reasonable?

Mind blown: are these the best science-fiction/fantasy books of the twenty-first century?

25 August 2025

Singapore based Australian blogger, and science-fiction writer Skribe, recently asked his Mastodon followers to name one sci-fi/fantasy novel, written this century, that has blown their minds. From those suggestions, he drew up this list of seven titles:

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, published in 2020
Anathem by Neal Stephenson, published in 2010
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, published in 2013
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published in 2015
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, published in 2020
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, published in 2021
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, published in 2015

In a since closed poll asking people to vote for the title they considered the best, I went for Piranesi. Mainly because it was the only novel from the list that I’d read, but also because British author Susanna Clarke’s tome compelled me to write at length about it afterwards.

Long story short, Piranesi is about someone of the same name, who finds themselves mostly alone in a house of epic proportions. It can literally take days to move from one part of the multi-level structure, to another. The house itself is a character in its own right, and as I read through the story, I almost felt as if I was there with Piranesi, so vivid was Clarke’s description of the sprawling abode.

Future Boy, a book by Michael J. Fox, and a missing Gibson guitar

20 August 2025

Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey through the Space-Time Continuum, is a book written by American actor Michael J. Fox, of, of course, Back to the Future (BTTF) fame, in conjunction with TV and film producer, Nelle Fortenberry.

Fans of the 1985 time-travel caper, and Fox himself, probably already know the story. Fox was also on the cast of TV sitcom Family Ties, and during the filming of BTTF, would shuttle back and forth between the sets of TV and film. TV during the day, film by night. If working two jobs each day was tiring, Fox sure as hell didn’t show it, as he seemed to do nothing but burst about the screen in BTTF.

Future Boy delves deeper into this story, through interviews with the cast and crew of both Family Ties and BTTF, and will be published on Tuesday 14 October 2025.

That’ll definitely be a red-letter day for BTTF aficionados.

And in other news, BTTF cast and crew are searching for the guitar, the Cherry Red Gibson ES-345 to be precise, which Marty McFly played when performing Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode, at the Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance.

This is no publicity stunt (I don’t think). BTTF producers realised the iconic guitar was missing when they went to film the sequel, Back to the Future Part II, back in 1989.

They’re hoping to find it today, soon, this century, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of BTTF, and the release of a documentary about the film, Lost to the Future, which I think goes to air later this year. Members of the cast, including Fox, Harry Waters Jr, Lea Thompson, and Christopher Lloyd, are among those who have issued an appeal for information in the search for the Gibson.

I’d forgotten 2025 was such a red-letter year in the history of BTTF. I think this calls for a screening this evening of BTTF.

Enshittification, word of 2024, a book by Cory Doctorow 2025

11 August 2025

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, by Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and author Cory Doctorow, will be published in October 2025.

Doctorow coined the word enshittification in 2022. Long story short, the neologism describes how online platforms go from being useful to useless, on account of the greed of their owners.

Facebook and Instagram are good examples of enshittification at work. Once both social networks were populated by content created by members. As time has passed though, much of what appears on these platforms is effectively advertising.

Enshittification was named the 2024 word of the year by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary.

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The Long Night, the new Christian White novel, October 2025

14 July 2025

Victoria based Australian author, Christian White, that raconteur of the redirect, that teller of tantalising thrillers, has a new novel, The Long Night, being published on Tuesday 28 October 2025. His publisher, Affirm Press, describes White’s fifth book, as his “darkest” yet:

Em has lived a quiet life with her complicated mother and is now looking for love and a potential escape from her small hometown. When a masked man kidnaps her in the dark of night, though, she is drawn into a terrifying world.

Jodie has been trying to forget a troubling time in her life, pouring her trauma into her work and out of her mind. Until one night her daughter is kidnapped and Jodie is dragged back into the violence.

As Em and Jodie race into the darkness, the agony of the past rushes up to meet them. It will take all their devotion and courage to escape this night alive.

Here’s hoping White’s good run of form continues. I’ve read all of his novels except (so far) Wild Place, and will be looking out for The Long Night later this year.

Limit AI use Colleen Hoover, Dennis Lehane, others, ask book publishers

10 July 2025

Colleen Hoover and Dennis Lehane are among American authors who have signed an open letter to book publishers including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Hachette, asking them to extensively limit their use of AI. The authors are requesting no AI generated work be published, and publishing company staff are not replaced, either partly or wholly, by AI technologies.

The authors demands are reasonable, to a degree. Any AI created works of fiction will most certainly contain the literary DNA of previously published writers, given the quantity of novels that have been used to train AI models. I believe though reputable publishers would think twice about publishing books one-hundred percent generated by AI. But I’m not sure the authors’ expectations that the roles of employees be guaranteed is realistic, well intentioned as it is.

AI is here to stay. Attempting to create AI-free sanctuaries in workplaces is pointless. AI will impact on everyone’s work one way or another. What we need to do is adapt. The matter that really needs to be addressed, is the issue of writers’ works being used to train chatbots without permission or recompense. Maybe the letter will draw further attention to this problem.

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